Pop Culture Passion: Armored Crysanthemum

In as far as memes can be considered pop culture, I'd like to present my favorite meme from Japan. First a little history. Following the massive earthquake earlier this year, most advertisers chose to pull their commercials to allow for longer, and in some cases continuous, coverage of the disaster. As such, most of the commercials that were left to air came directly from the Japanese Advertising Council, or AC. One such advertisement was the "Greetings Are Magic" campaign, which aimed to encourage Japanese youth to use proper everyday greetings. Here is the original in it's entirety.

Not long after, some enterprising individual, no doubt feeling a certain special something was missing from these commercials, posted this video on Nico Nico Douga. In it, one of the animal mascots leaps out of frame and transforms into a giant robot. Inspired by the hand drawn awesomeness of the first video, several others soon followed. Here are a few of my favorites.
This meme is referred to as either the Hard Lined Armored Empire or Armored Chrysanthemum (AC). It has naturally expanded a bit from the original commercials to include things such as fake anime openings and episode previews. Despite the more serious tone of these clips, I believe the idea that these animal robots are supposed to be helping children make friends has gone unchanged.